philosophy

When a flattering email arrived inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I’d later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam. For one thing, the…

“It’s really radical,” Stanley told me of Maven, “We got rid of likes and follows. That’s like insanity.” Some early adopters seem to be on board. “I quit all social media about three years ago because of the hostility, disinformation,…

Would it be too disruptive if protests staged sit-ins or chained themselves to the doors of AI developers, one member of the Discord asked. “Probably not. We do what we have to, in the end, for a future with humanity, while we still…

Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential…

The Federal Communications Commission has voted—once again—to assert its power to oversee and regulate the activities of the broadband industry in the United States. In a 3-2 vote, the agency reinstated net neutrality rules that had been…

Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher in Montreal, responded to WIRED's story to say it was “10,000 percent true!” She added that over-the-top interviews are a long-established problem in parts of the industry. During a past job search, she…

Open AI’s new boss is the same as the old boss. But the company—and the artificial intelligence industry—may have been profoundly changed by the past five days of high-stakes soap opera. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, cofounder, and figurehead,…

Altman’s ouster shows an organization that was meant to align superintelligent AI with humanity failing to align the values of even its own board members and leadership. Adding a profit-seeking component to the nonprofit project turned it…

Self-driving-car developers initially held a similar philosophy of data maximization. They generate video from arrays of cameras inside and outside the vehicles, audio recordings from microphones, point clouds mapping objects in space from…

If saying “no” all the time has you feeling like the bad guy in the family, it might be time for a communication makeover. An avalanche of “nos” can dim your connection with your children, but there are ways to make “yes” a more regular…